These Charts Show What We're Not Doing Because We're Online All The Time

In a relatively short amount of time, the Internet has moved from
an occasional tool to one of the principal ways we communicate,
entertain ourselves, and do work. And all that time we spend
online has to come at the expense of something else.

A new NBER working
paper from the Technology Policy Institute's Scott
Wallsten takes a look at what we've stopped doing as we've
become more and more Internet obsessed. Basically, it examines
the opportunity cost of time spent online. On the more obvious
side, we spend less time watching TV, socializing offline,
relaxing, and thinking. But leisure time online also comes at the
expense of work, sleep, and education.

Across all Americans, the time
spent online for leisure, which includes everything from social
media to reading news, is relatively low, just 13 minutes.
But that doesn't count time spent on email, watching videos,
and gaming, and includes the substantial share of people who
don't use computers for leisure or at all. When you look at just
people who do use the Internet for leisure, it's for more like
100 minutes a day. That share of people has grown rapidly in
recent years:

One of the most concerning trends is the drop in time spent on
education. Part of the large gap here is that people spend less
time on education as they grow older. But Wallsten found that the
effect on education of leisure time on the Internet is greater
for younger people. Additionally, that young age group spends by
far the most time online:

And whether or not you think that socializing online is
inherently inferior to meeting up in real life, the trend is
pretty clear. There's been a massive drop in the amount of time
we spend socializing in person:

It's not easy to make a blanket
statement that these effects are positive or negative. But it is
clear that all of that extra time online comes at a cost to other
activities. That makes it exceptionally difficult to figure out
how much of our time on the Internet boosts productivity versus
sapping it.